SNAKE CHARMER

Jim Holder goes in search of Korea's Stelvio Pass to see how his favourite car of last year, the Genesis GV60, responds to the twists and turns that lie ahead

- Jim Holder

Korea's fastest electric hot hatch. Korea's twistiest road. This one should write itself, right? As I glide out of bustling Seoul's surprisingly free-moving traffic and push east towards the rural coast, rolling along Route 60 amid a mixture of heavy trucks and a multitude of Hyundais and Kias, it's hard not to conclude that I've lucked in: the traffic is light, the weather decent and the Genesis GV60 all the car I remembered it to be.

As tradition dictates, at the close of 2022, we were all asked to nominate our cars of the year. Ferrari 296 GTB, Maserati MC20, Pininfarina Battista... In that company and with sales figures in the UK barely troubling the hundreds, my nomination of the GV60 felt sufficiently left-field that I opened the piece with an apology (although I should give honourable mention to Piers Ward for going with and justifying the Kia Picanto).

On reflection, I shouldn't have been so meek. Genesis may be a relatively new brand in Europe, and its understated quest to push the performance envelope of EVs into new territory, but there was never any doubt that the GV60 would be good. Sharing technology with the Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ioniq 5, among the best mass-market EVs on sale today, its family lineage was too special for it to go drastically wrong.